yoke of
Britain and call yourselves independent? Was it from a disposition fond of
change, or to procure new masters?--if those were your motives, you have
reward before you--go, retire into silent obscurity, and kiss the rod that
scourges you, bury the prospects you had in store, that you and your
posterity would participate in the blessings of freedom, and the
employments of your country--let the rich and insolent alone be your
rulers. Perhaps you are designed by providence as an emphatic evidence of
the mutability of human affairs, to have the show of happiness only, that
your misery may seem the sharper, and if so, you must submit. But if you
had nobler views, and you are not designed by heaven as an example--are you
now to be derided and insulted? Is the power of thinking, on the only
subject important to you, to be taken away? and if per chance you should
happen to differ from Caesar, are you to have Caesar's principles crammed
down your throats with an army? God forbid!

In democratic republics the people collectively are considered as the
sovereign--all legislative, judicial, and executive power, is inherent in
and derived from them. As a people, your power and authority have
sanctioned and established the present government--your executive,
legislative, and judicial acknowledge it by their public acts--you are
again solicited to sanction and establish the future one--yet this Caesar
mocks your dignity and laughs at the majesty of the people. Caesar, with
his usual dogmatism, enquires, if I had talents to throw light on the
subject of legislation, why did I not offer them when the Convention was
in session? He is answered in a moment--I thought with him and you, that
the wisdom of America, in that Convention, was drawn as it were to a
Focus. I placed an unbounded confidence in some of the characters who were
members of it, from the services they had rendered their country, without
adverting to the ambitious and interested views of others. I was willingly
led to expect a model of perfection and security that would have
astonished the world. Therefore to have offered observation, on the
subject of legislation, under these impressions, would have discovered no
less arrogance than Caesar. The Convention, too, when in session, shut
their doors to the observations of the community, and their members were
under an obligation of secrecy. Nothing transpired. To have suggested
remarks on unknown and anticipated principles